For variety and fun, make your own pizza

Friday

Editor's note: This story originally ran for Super Bowl 2002, but is being updated and reprinted for National Pizza Day because it offers tips on making your own.

Homemade pizza costs about half as much as ordering out ($3 to $4 for a one-topping made at home) and it lets you get creative. You can make smaller individual pizzas, then put out a buffet of toppings and let friends create their own pies. You can shape the traditionally round pizza like a football to mark the big game. Or you can play to impress by hand-tossing dough like the pros do.

With good dough and practice, Alex MacLellan says, almost anyone can make a pretty good pizza fresh from the home oven. He should know.

“I’ve been making pizza since January 2, 1979, and I’ve probably made at least a half-million pizzas personally,” says MacLellan, 49, owner of BZ’s Pizza in Dennisport.

Takeout is great, he says, but there’s nothing like pizza eaten fresh from the oven. So even if you want takeout, MacLellan advises ordering pies half-baked and finishing them at home.

“You know it’s done,” he says, “when the cheese is bubbled up and starting to come down and the crust is golden brown. Once it’s in the oven, keep a close eye on it.”

Getting started

Today’s homemade pizza is not the little box kit many of us grew up with. You can still buy that box of powdered dough, pizza sauce and grated cheese. But stores today offer a variety of other options. Pizza-making can be as simple as personalizing a frozen pie with spicy sausage or fresh vegetables. Or pizza can be as involved as making dough from scratch, by hand or in your bread machine.

So many plays, so little time.

No matter which option you choose, your game plan should start with a pizza stone in a very hot (450- to 500-degree) oven.

“You need a stone for Italian-style pizza,” MacLellan says. “The dough hits that hot stone and it zaps all the moisture out. You get a nice crispy crust.”

Available everywhere from discount and cook-supply stores to high-end catalogs, a pizza stone will run you 10 bucks and up. Most come with a metal cradle so you can let the pizza cool and then serve it right from the stone.

A common mistake for rookie pizza makers is assembling the pie right on the stone and then putting the whole thing in the oven. No, MacLellan says, no.

“Leave the stone in the oven all the time, right at the bottom or on a rack set nearest the bottom of the oven,” he says. “Make the pizza on a wooden paddle or any flat surface. You can use a little Wondra flour (a granular flour used to thicken sauces) or corn meal to make it slide off easily onto the stone.”

You can use a pizza stone to make thick or thin crust pizza. If you want a crust that is chewier and richer (alas, more fattening), use a metal pan. Unlike the clay stone, the pan is not porous. So any oil in the recipe will be drawn into the pizza.

Laying the foundation

A pizza is only as good as the crust upon which it is built.

Today’s cookbooks and Web sites offer an astounding array of variations in the basic yeast crust. You can make focaccia-style pizza with Italian herbs or buy pre-baked focaccia and simply layer on sauce, cheese and toppings for a pizza that’s ready in 10 minutes or less.

You can buy balls of fresh dough, in traditional or wheat, at most grocery stores or at pizzerias like BZ’s. Dough costs about a dollar per pizza. You may save a little money by making your own dough, especially if you’re turning out several pizzas for the party.

You can roll dough out, throw it in the air or press it into place with your fingers. You can form it in any shape so long as it’s about the same thickness all the way across so it will cook evenly.

Anyone who has experimented with dough from the grocery store may have ended up with fat edges and a middle so thinned-out that it’s actually tearing in places.

One of the tricks to turning a ball of refrigerated dough into a 14-inch pizza is to make sure the dough has warmed enough to be pliable before you start trying to spread it or toss it. So let it set at room temperature for a half hour or so before you start working with it.

Next, MacLellan says, cover the dough ball, rolling surface and your hands with a little flour so the dough won’t stick. As you work the dough into a larger and larger circle, be sure to brush off most of the excess flour. The pizza won’t brown properly if the dough is covered in flour.

You can use the same dough for thick- or thin-crust pizza, but a thick pie will require time to rise before it goes in the oven. Shape the dough as described above and then, MacLellan advises, “If you’re going to do a thick pizza in a pan, put (the flattened dough) in the pan, cover it and let it rise at room temperature so it has that airiness.”

Like bread, pizza dough rises at different rates. Check it after a half-hour or so to see if it’s about as thick as you want.

It’s traditional to make pizza with a thicker, doughy edge, but you don’t have too.

“The sauce determines that,” MacLellan says. “If you put sauce on the edge, or even get it wet with sauce, it won’t rise. You could roll the dough flat in a circle and put sauce on the whole thing and you would have a pizza with no crust at the edge.”

Crust stuffed with cheese or even sauce is popular at some pizzerias and in the frozen foods section. A home cook’s tip for easy cheese stuffing: Slice the mozzarella sticks you buy for snacking lengthwise into quarters, position them along the pizza’s outer edge and fold the dough over to enclose them.

Also, for a change of pace, roll out a small ball of dough, cover it with sauce and toppings and fold in half, pinching edges together for calzone-like individual pizzas. Make these small and keep the crust thin or they will be too large for a single serving.

Building on the foundations

While red sauce is traditional on pizza, you can change that to a creamy Alfredo sauce, a basil-and-pine nut pesto or anything else that has enough thickness to cling to the dough. The only guideline is to consider how your sauce and toppings work together: You may not want a cream sauce on a pizza with a rich topping like sausage or bacon.

MacLellan says he likes to dab just a little oil at the center of the dough and then spread sauce in bigger and bigger circles so the oil is spread over the pizza.

An option that’s increasingly popular is white pizza, which has no sauce under the toppings.

“The sky’s the limit with pizza and it’s changed over the 21 years I’ve been here,” MacLellan says, referring to his restaurant. “It used to be pepperoni, cheese, mushrooms and onions. Now everybody’s gotten very creative with pizzas. People like everything, even artichokes. We have an Arizona White with no sauce, spinach, ricotta, garlic, plum tomatoes and pecorino romano cheese.”

This openness in defining pizza has led to some extremes which, often, taste extremely good.

At Charlie’s Place in Wareham, they serve a meatloaf pizza that includes not only ground beef and spices, but also a thin layer of mashed potatoes cushioned between the red sauce and cheese. “It’s almost like a shepherd’s pie,” says owner Charlie Nickolaow. (Nickolaow died in May 2016, but his family continues to run the restaurant.)

How do you get to the point of putting mashed potatoes on pizza?

“We were in the kitchen and somebody wanted something different to eat. We were fooling around and put it together. It tasted good so we put it on the menu,” Nickolaow said.

Mashed-potato pizza is probably - make that definitely - not for everyone, but it has its fans. That’s the beauty of making your own pizza. Any happy accident can happen on way to the oven.

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